Offshore Wind Farms: Technologies, Design and Operation provides the latest information on offshore wind energy, one of Europe's most promising and quickly maturing industries, and a potentially huge untapped renewable energy source which could contribute significantly towards EU 20-20-20 renewable energy generation targets. It has been estimated that by 2030 Europe could have 150GW of offshore wind energy capacity, meeting 14% of our power demand. Offshore Wind Farms: Technologies, Design and Operation provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging technologies, design, and operation of offshore wind farms. Part One introduces offshore wind energy as well as offshore wind turbine siting with expert analysis of economics, wind resources, and remote sensing technologies. The second section provides an overview of offshore wind turbine materials and design, while part three outlines the integration of wind farms into power grids with insights to cabling and energy storage. The final section of the book details the installation and operation of offshore wind farms with chapters on condition monitoring and health and safety, amongst others.

Space-time block code (STBC) is a maturing technology to achieve transmit diversity over fading channels. As the number of transmit antennas increases beyond two, current approaches to design STBCs either make trade off between the achievable diversity gain and the code rate, or achieve both full diversity and full rate at the expense of exponentially increased decoder complexity. This book presents a new STBC design method that combines two real orthogonal STBCs (O-STBC) with offset QAM. This approach is able to achieve both full diversity and full code rate, yet allows simple real symbol wise decoding whose complexity is independent of the number of transmit antennas. This book provides a detailed analysis of the impact of key system parameters on the error performance of the scheme. A complete chapter is devoted to systematic design of the two real O-STBCs for optimal error performance. This book should be useful to any researcher who is in the field of MIMO communications, or any engineering professional who is looking for an effective STBC solution for practical implementation.